A hugely popular game from the Bitmap Bros on the Amiga and other 16-bit systems done way back in around 1991. Famous not only for the game itself, but for the music score for the game. In the year 2000, work was started on a unofficial C64 conversion, and a site was put up to show progress.
Eventually an intro was released, which contained some reasonable titles and a decent conversion of the GODS theme tune. Sadly there was nothing playable, until a while later.
Before the site disappeared, the team released a small preview of the map, and slightly playable version of level 1. Those who downloaded their Xmas demo and decoded a special message could be 1 of 10 potential beta-testers to test a later version of the game. It was reported that the game was around 50% complete overall (most of the code was done, just needing final maps and character designs).
Sadly, no-one seems to have either the early demo or the beta demo and therefore the intro is all that currently remains. Their website originally said the following:
“As you can see this is the Entire map to level 1-1, This is just the background map, there are another 2 maps that go with this as each level is built with 3 layers of maps, there are a background map, Interactive map & a baddie map, the interactive map is a map that contains things like AI pointers and switches, then of course the baddie map contains all the baddie locations and paths. Look out for a playable level 1-1 demo coming very soon.”
Thanks to the Wayback machine, here was the last update and invite for beta testers:
“MERRY XMAS – SPECIAL DOWNLOAD
The above download, is a WIP from 3 months ago, The Final version is A Whole FUCKLOAD nicer We are releasing this OLD demo now to keep scene interest.
Unzip, load the PRG into real or emulated 64 and type SYS 32768 (Return)
Feel Free to Email us about this, But keep in mind this is in no way a current wip. Alot of changes have been made since.
Beta Tester’s Req’d
Merry Christmas to every c64/128 freak out there. We are nearing the end of godz production, Phew! its been hard Everything is done, Music, Gfx, Code, AI, Its all there, However as we have played it to death we don’t know if its to hard or not hard enough anymore we need testers. so to make the selection process fair we have a plan :)
All you have to do is download our christmas greetingtro. load it up on your fave emulator (we recommend WinVice 1.6) and follow the instructions, it tells you all you need to know
Shortly after the festive season our new website will open up with the first public release of Godz. Hex (Me) is busy doing all the website material now (lots of shockwave).”
There were some rumors that development on Gods had been stopped, and Hexl0rd responded:
“Two of my colleagues work on it without me, but the development speed is slowing down. We are working always on GODS, we don’t give up the idea. I am working twice than before, and we will put up one new webpage with a demo with 3 levels.”
At the time, I remember many people thinking that Gods was nothing more than a fake production to drum up some interest in the scene. We had contact from a guy called Andy in 2006, who had spoken with Hexl0rd at the time and had seen a lot of the game. He confirmed it wasn’t fake as a result, and seemed like he was one of the beta testers. After promising to try and dig out the previews, they sadly disappeared (the old email address now bouncing).
According to Andy, the coder was struggling with the AI and sprite multiplexer in particular, and could have been why the game was abandoned in the end.
The likes of Hexl0rd, Marta and Ventura all seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, so we hope they see this page some day to get in touch and shed some light on the development, and even share what remains of the game. The only other hope is if someone happened to download the early preview off the site or were one of the beta testers. If that was you – please get in touch!
Sadly, I recall downloading the map demo and running it – but I didn’t archive it at the time. From what I recall, it just had a very basic character that could move around a very simple map that scrolled in multiple directions. I can recall there being ladders dotted around. There were no enemies or sounds and it was quite dark/blue – like the colour scheme in the intro demo.
If you have old CD archives from around 2000-2001 time, then check them for anything that looks like “gods” or “gods.zip” (which was the download filename).
In the meantime, in late November 2023 (and after many searches across digital archives in the past), I made a small breakthrough. On our very own Jazzcat’s disks, we located a “GODS” file which seemed a decent size. When loading it up, it did nothing – so we tried the SYS code as mentioned on the old Gods web page. Unfortunately, we were greeted by the same (uncompressed/uncracked) intro sequence with digital music that has been floating around for some time.
Looking in the code – we noticed that there seems to be remnants of the game character set for level 1 first of all (which has probably been present in the intro release already out there).
However – lurking on the same disk was a file called “XMAS”, which also didn’t autorun when loading. Putting the same SYS code in, we were greeted by the Christmas demo which was mentioned, with the message that had to be decoded to become a beta tester.
So its something related to the development, and we’ve added it here – but still not the previews sadly. Couldn’t see anything else similar on the rest of Jazzcat’s disks. Hopefully some day we will find more.
